Law Firm Thinks Women Are Airheads

Law Firm Thinks Women Are Airheads

“Practice big words!!” – when do you say that to an attorney and it not sound insulting?

Business ethics would seem to suggest equal treatment for equal work but there just must be something about women in the workplace that drives men to stupidity? I don’t get it. By the time, you have gotten through law school, that big words problem is done. The rest sound like some male with supervisory status gets his education on women’s conduct from old reruns of Ally McBeal. Surely, there is some actual experience in the firm of supervision that doesn’t depend on insults to keep people in line? Or maybe this is just based in the firms collective mind in the concept that women have many child-like immature characteristics and need a different management touch?

I don’t think you need any deep business ethics analysis. Don’t insult your workers. If there is a conduct problem, deal with it intelligently and don’t firebomb the staff with a badly thought out memo.

And from my own personal thought, it may be time for the outdated concept that women are just larger children to die, to go away, to run off into the wilderness of failed and mindless ideas and starve there alone.

Clifford Chance, a massive, international law firm employing thousands of elite attorneys, distributed a memo entitled “Presentation Tips for Women” that was better suited for a middle school forensics class than for graduates of the world’s leading law schools. Worse, interspersed between rudimentary pieces of advice such as “Stand up” and “Don’t wave your arms” are a series of often-gendered suggestions that call into question whether one of the world’s largest law firms understands that professional women are fully capable of dressing themselves.

Among the words of advice offered to every single female associate at Clifford Chance are “Don’t dress like a mortician,” “Wear a suit, not your party outfit,” “If wearing a skirt, make sure audience can’t see up it when sitting on the dias,” and — in an odd reference to six year-old sexist news coverage of then-Senator Hillary Clinton — “No one heard Hillary the day she showed cleavage.”

I don’t want to fall into the trap of blaming all men for this crap, because I do happen to know some decent fellows who, for the most part, don’t buy into it, and when they do, are pretty good at giving themselves a slap upside the head and realizing they’re being kind of piggish. And I do think women, myself included, have become very, very good at playing the male chauvinist game, and we need to stop being complicit in destroying ourselves to keep it going. So, yeah, it takes two to tango and other related truisms, but goddammit, it’s becoming more and more impossible for me to remain calm and logical in the face of the increasingly Sisyphean task of bearing the responsibility for all things dull and ugly while taking none of the credit for their opposite.